She almost just said, I have something to show you. Then she could have just slipped into her griffin form—the transformation already felt as easy and natural as water rolling downhill. It would be incredible to see the looks on their faces.
But as much fun as it would have been to spring a surprise griffin on them, Gretchen thought that what she needed wasn’t the big showoff moment but the big moment of trust. The last time she’d insisted that she felt like a shifter, that she had an inner voice, that she was like them—she’d been just a kid. A kid who had needed to be protected from impulses like, say, suggesting her little sister take a bite out of her. She’d spent years feeling like that kid, like she still needed to protect herself against wishful thinking. The last few days had taught her that that wasn’t true, not anymore.
Cooper had shown her the person she really was. He’d known it right away.
She could show that to her family. But it would mean even more if she could find out that they already knew it, that she was the only person who hadn’t trusted herself.
She said, “I found out I’m really a shifter after all.”
The next thing she knew, Tricia had bounded off the sofa and wrapped her in a back-breaking hug.
“Oh, Gretch, that’s amazing. I know it’s what you’ve always wanted.”
And the Miller, Miller-Alvarez, Miller-Sousa, and Miller-Hendrickson-Smith voices were saying things like:
“I knew it! Didn’t I know it?” Bonnie exclaimed. “I said she could bench-press more than any human woman I ever met.”
“Aunt Gretchen, are you a lynx like us?”
“Maybe she’s a badger. There was a badger on my paternal grandfather’s side...”
“How did you find out?”
“Can you shift for us now, or is it going to mess up your clothes?”
They believed her.
They had a billion questions for her, but none of them were anything close to, “Are you sure?”
They—like Cooper, like Martin, like Theo and Colby and even Keith—knew the person she was now, and they trusted her to know what she was doing. Gretchen felt like some balloon strings that had tied her down her whole life had finally been decisively cut. Most of those strings had gotten snipped while she and Cooper were on the road, but one or two had stubbornly held on. Childhood stuff was hard to get rid of. But now, seeing her family unite around her with complete trust and extremely loud enthusiasm, Gretchen felt the last of those old worries go. And she floated up, flying even without her wings.
“I’m part lynx,” Gretchen said. “I’m a griffin—part lynx and part falcon.”
That caused another eruption of questions, and answering them took up a lot of time. Then it really was faster—and better—to just go ahead and shift.
“You’ll have to stand back a little,” she said. “I’m kind of big.”
“Don’t you want to get undressed first?”
Gretchen grinned and shook her head.
“Oh, right, she’s mythic,” her brother Toby groaned, his voice ripe with envy. “Of course she gets to keep her clothes.”
“I know,” Tricia said, reaching over to pat him on the hand. “You’ve never forgiven us for tricking you into letting Katie LaPaglia see you naked in the backyard that one time.”
“I was fifteen! I couldn’t show my face in school for a week! And I couldn’t explain it, so everyone thought I just hung around your backyard naked! I never dated again.” He sighed, but then affection crept back in to sit alongside the outrage, and he wrapped his arm around his wife Anna’s shoulders. “Not that it didn’t work out.”
“Well, I’m safe from embarrassment,” Gretchen said. “Just watch.”
She melted into her griffin form, with her back paws thudding and her front talons clicking as they all hit the floor.
“Falcolynx,” Kimberly, one of Gretchen’s nieces, breathed.
“I think you can just call her a griffin, sweetie.”
Kimberly shook her head stubbornly. “You can just make it into one word. She’s like the griffin version of a labradoodle. Aunt Gretchen, can I touch you?”
Gretchen had been holding back a laugh at that labradoodle line—for all she knew, a griffin’s laugh sounded terrifying, and she didn’t want to scare the kids—and now she swallowed it down. She nodded and let Kimberly approach.